[elsmandino]

Hello,

I have only ever used the Confluence skin with Kodi and due to my recent need to add some additional categories, I need something that allows me to add additional parent categories to the homepage.

I have tried Xonfluence, but did not really get on with it.

I have a number of Raspberry Pis (all various models), including a B1, so I need a skin that is very light (I want to use the same skin on all the RPis, so as to avoid confusion in my household).

Anything minimal, too, would be great - I turn off all the fancy bells and whilstles, wherever possible.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[beachkid]

The OSMC skin might work well for you. It was updated for Leia Support https://github.com/osmc/skin.osmc

[JulianFP]

I used Amber when I had a Pi B1 and always found that quite light weight and personally liked the very simple layout. It also has some pretty decent ability to customise the home menus, not as completely customisable as something like Mimic or Eminence but more customisable than Confluence or Estuary. With Amber you can switch off home menu entries that you don’t want (no surprise there) but it also has a load of extra unused empty (no label or action set) menu items added to the home menu and all disabled by default. If you want to add your own custom item to the top level home menu you add it to your favourites and you can then set that favourite (maybe to launch a specific addon) as the action for one of these empty menu items, set the label to something meaningful, and then enable that menu item to appear on your home menu.

Personally I use Mimic now but I’ve moved to an nVidia Shield so can’t really judge whether it’s lightweight or not. Amber certainly did the job for me on my Pi B1 a few years ago though.

[elsmandino]

Perfect thanks for that - I shall check both of those out.

Amber does look particularly promising - all I really need is a very basic skin with the ability to add my own home screen menu categories.

I tried Quartz last night but that did not really given me the ability to do what I wanted.

Out of interest, what is the difference between using Favourites for custom home menus as opposed to Smartlists?

[DarrenHill]

The version of Amber currently in the official repo is not compatible with Kodi Leia.

There have been some tweaks made to get a partially working version (see here for download link) but until now the original authors/maintainers haven't updated it for a while, so it may be orphaned.

[elsmandino]

Thanks Darren.

I tried Amber last night (via the  and it was exactly what I was looking for - was really quick and unbloated, very easy to navigate and really easy to add custom entries to the home screen with "favourites". 

I did not really understand the difference between using favourites and smartlists, before,  but I can now see that it is just another way to achieve the same outcome.

A real shame that it might end of life - I was planning on sticking with it for the foreseeable future.

[DarrenHill]

Likewise. I've been using it for ages, on both Pi3 and Pi0. It's simple enough and configurable enough for the wife and kids to easily work, and it does everything needed with minimal fuss and overheads.

On my Pi3 I'm setting up Xonfluence as a potential replacement, but I've yet to try it on the zero's. It's certainly configurable enough and looks nice, although there are enough differences in how it does things (especially in relation to add-ons) that it wouldn't be a seamless switch if it does have to be done.

I also wouldn't like to see Amber go unsupported as it's more or less the go-to skin for the Pi. However it's been a while since we've seen anything of the maintainers here, so I'm not too hopeful unless someone else can take it up (or the others come back).

[elsmandino]

I did try Xonfluence but didn't take to it, for some reason - it did seem a bit slower than than the regular Confluence skin, but that might be because there were extra add-ons and default settings that I needed to turn off.  In fact, I was a little bit overwhelmed by just how many settings there were.

I have yet to try Amber on my Raspberry Pi1s, but if you are using it on Zeros, this should be fine.

I hadn't realised that Amber was so popular for Pis - I would have changed ages ago (typical that I might have found out, just as the skin is being abandoned).  

I will stick with Amber for the time-being but keep an eye on the Amber thread to see what is being considered the best replacement (just in case we do need to change).